Aesthetic Theory by Theodor W. Adorno Adorno (Theory and History of Literature)

Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation ‘art is the sedimented history of human misery'. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.

Theodor W. Adorno is the progenitor of critical theory, a central figure in aesthetics, and the century's foremost philosopher of music. He was born and educated in Frankfurt, Germany. After completing his Ph.D. in philosophy, he went to Vienna, where he studied composition with Alban Berg. He soon was bitterly disappointed with his own lack of talent and turned to musicology. In 1928 Adorno returned to Frankfurt to join the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as The Frankfurt School. At first a privately endowed center for Marxist studies, the school was merged with Frankfort's university under Adorno's directorship in the 1950s. As a refugee from Nazi Germany during World War II, Adorno lived for several years in Los Angeles before returning to Frankfurt. Much of his most significant work was produced at that time. Critics find Adorno's aesthetics to be rich in insight, even when they disagree with its broad conclusions. Although Adorno was hostile to jazz and popular music, he advanced the cause of contemporary music by writing seminal studies of many key composers. To the distress of some of his admirers, he remained pessimistic about the prospects for art in mass society. Adorno was a neo-Marxist who believed that the only hope for democracy was to be found in an interpretation of Marxism opposed to both positivism and dogmatic materialism. His opposition to positivisim and advocacy of a method of dialectics grounded in critical rationalism propelled him into intellectual conflict with Georg Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Heideggerian hermeneutics.
Rolf Tiedemann is the literary executor of Adorno and of Walter Benjamin and the editor of the German editions of Adorno's collected works and his posthumous writings.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Aesthetic Theory

Publishers Weekly

While the imitators of great literary theorists may have produced the least lucid, most jargon-laden and most parodied literary and cultural criticism since the 18th century, editors Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse of the University of Minnesota's Theory and History of Literature series can...

Project MUSE

In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, soci...

Project MUSE

In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, soci...